But It Refused
by The Exile
Summary: He had to do this before. He's quite looking forward to the end of the world, in fact, he just wants it done right.


**A/N: AU, set after Infinity War, referencing Thor: Ragnarok, HEAVY SPOILERS**

 **I do not know any canon about the MCU other than films already released in the UK.**

* * *

Silence fell. Over the whole Universe it spread, the space between the rise and fall of a ticking pendulum, a tolling funeral bell. Potential energy sending ripples throughout existence, the force of a billion black holes, reversing creation, starting off new event horizons.

The silence didn't dissipate. Like a broken clock, where the pendulum didn't fall.

From his deep slumber in the middle of his new infernal throne, a world whose very core had erupted under the pressure of his burning blade, he woke with a start. Like any sleeper suddenly realising something was wrong with his environment, like they could smell smoke or had been asleep for a really long time when they thought they'd set their alarm to go off after an hour, or the Universe was dying of grand cosmic anticlimax, he was fully alert when his feet hit the ground, sending out a pyroclastic shockwave that formed a convenient crater. He scratched behind his left ear, sending up glowing embers, then sniffed the aether.

He shivered. Somewhere in the heart of creation, a hearth fire had been left to go out. It now reeked acrid black smoke. Hackles raised, eyes searing dark trails, he growled, showing off jagged fangs and wispy curls of superheated steam. His right fist clenched around the hilt of his fiery sword.

Worlds were ending. This didn't interest him in the least. A world was a fragile and delicious thing. He'd ended countless himself, fully a third of them by accident. However, there was a right way and a wrong way to bring about an Apocalypse. Reducing billions of people to ash, that meant nothing. They caught fire so easily, after all, flaring up in such bright and brilliant colours. The meat smelled so tempting to his hungry flames, its warmth so satisfying as it blackened to a crisp. So much energy was released all at once as the essential particles of the Universe were liberated to speed up and move where they will. Then you got to see creation work its wonders again, the forge with the only flames hot enough to rival your own...

This... this was wrong. This was atrophy. This was the abandoned, the life sucked out of it, crumbling to dust in a cold dark corner of the Universe. No matter what that idiot thought, that child operating heavy machinery for fun, it wasn't even clean deletion he was achieving. There was no carefully amending paragraphs, removing points from clauses. The blind scrawling over sections of the Universe he'd done, had damaged the very infrastructure of time and space. The music had stopped. The motion that the music kept time for... all of it was grinding to a standstill.

First the half of it that suddenly couldn't find certain references in its chain of cause and effect, entire names suddenly missing that had chains of consequences leading in all directions where cross-references no longer made sense, before it inevitably started leaking beyond even the fates of those directly affected. Especially when certain key nodes, grander and more influential destinies, were suddenly lost without even a footnote to say why they were erased.

He was no expert in the mechanics of fate, so none of these complex thoughts were actually what hit him – more an instinct, as a force of nature, a fundamental drive of the Universe, that there was so much cold, darkness, stillness, emptiness, dust…

Meaningless grey dust everywhere...  
Burn, those instincts said to him, BURN and start the fires going, bring back the heat and light and movement and the sweet roaring of flames happily licking their prey before consuming it whole, the dancing and sputtering of its ember-children…

I should not have to keep doing this over and over every time something goes wrong, he thought to himself idly, maybe I should actually change my job description. First the stupid incident with Hel and that damn dog, and now this...

Then he shrugged, let out a bellow of exultation and finally satisfied bloodlust and frenzy, leapt into the air on the backwinds of a solar flare, then swung his sword around in a gesture of challenge to the fool that had disturbed his rest.


End file.
